I have a C# Windows Forms Application with a webBrowser within it. It visits a Wikia chatroom, where it then locates the element which contains the chat output. This element looks like:
<div style="" id="Chat_XXXXX" class="Chat">
<ul>
(chat text)
</ul>
</div>
The purpose of the program is to retrieve the chat text every once in a while for logging purposes. This is easily done by parsing the "InnerHtml" of the "Chat_XXXXX" element. However, I also need to clear the text from the window when I do this (for various reasons, I cannot leave the text in the window). I figured I would just erase the chat text portion of the element, as this is how it is done with a handy javascript file called "chat hacks" for Wiki chat (here). Or at least, I think that's how it does it. If you look at the function "clearWindow" in that file, you can see what it does:
NodeChatController.prototype.clearWindow = function() {
this.viewDiscussion.chatUL.html('');
this.inlineAlert(i18n['cleared']);
}
I have tried setting the InnerHtml of "Chat_XXXXX" using the following three strings (not all at the same time, of course):
HtmlDocument document = webBrowser1.Document;
document.GetElementById("Chat_XXXXX").InnerHtml = ""
document.GetElementById("Chat_XXXXX").InnerHtml = "<ul></ul>"
document.GetElementById("Chat_XXXXX").InnerHtml = "<ul><li class=\"inline-alert\"> Window cleared. </li></ul>"
However, although these clear the window (and in the case of the last one prints a message), the chat no longer updates as new messages show up. The only fix is to reload the page, which isn't an option, because reloading the page brings in a whole load of chat history (which I'm trying to avoid). I've also tried importing that javascript mentioned above into the page using:
HtmlElement head = webBrowser1.Document.GetElementsByTagName("head")[0];
HtmlElement scriptEl = webBrowser1.Document.CreateElement("script");
scriptEl.SetAttribute("type", "text/javascript");
scriptEl.SetAttribute("src", "https://db.tt/66q8UQbY");
head.AppendChild(scriptEl);
This javascript creates a button which clears the chat window. The button clears the window just fine, but again, the chat no longer updates. I know this button works correctly without stopping further incoming chat in "regular" browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Opera, etc). I've used it many times, and the script itself is quite popular in the Wikia community. I've already followed the steps here: "WPF WebBrowser Control - position:fixed Element jumps while scrolling (Windows 8)" to get the browser to act as close as it can (?) to Internet Explorer. I've already checked the Body field of the document after altering the InnerHtml to make sure that my replacements didn't alter anything important. Just for clarity, here's an example of what is contained in the (chat text) portion of my original example:
<li class="you" data-user="UserNameHere" id="entry-c812">
...avatars and junk...
<span class="message">hello</span>
</li>
I honestly have no idea what could be causing the chat element to stop updating after it has been edited (especially since it works outside of this program), so I don't know what information to include. Whatever you need, I'll provide it. Here's the javascript from Wikia which generates the chat output window: chat_js2. Look for "Chat_" to find the part which originally generates the window. I don't know where the output is updated in that file though.
